


Sonnets and the Dollhouse

by storiesfortravellers



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Alternate Universe, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Multi, Romance, Sonnets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-23
Updated: 2012-09-23
Packaged: 2017-11-14 21:14:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/519573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiesfortravellers/pseuds/storiesfortravellers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where Echo/Priya/Tony run away and stay together. They figure out how to stay off the radar and try to build a life together.  </p><p>Priya's POV on how Echo is like the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sonnets and the Dollhouse

When I draw her, I don't use many straight lines.

Whirls and spirals. Hair and lips and arms. The curve of the shoulder or the hip.

The eyes. Dark, dark, too large eyes.

I wonder if sometimes I am trying to find Caroline in those eyes.

I don't tell Echo this. She wouldn't understand.

But then she might. She seems to understand a lot of things that I probably couldn't.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I think about Sierra often.

She's not me. But she is.

She's the one who first fell in love with Tony.

Well, with Victor.

And really, Victor, not Tony, is the one who first loved me.

Until then, nobody in my entire life had ever loved me as much or as strong as he did. And he was just a sweet, blank body with no mind to speak of.

Except that's not really what we were. Not even close...

We were us. There were things taken from us... but loss doesn't make us other than us.

Sierra is like my little sister in some ways, I like to think. My helpless hapless twin, who could do anything and could do nothing.

I feel protective of her when I think of all she went through, and how she had no idea what was happening.

And sometimes I think Sierra is like my subconscious, urging me to do things. Big things like loving Tony and Echo. Or little things like sleeping in the bathtub, or having an irrational fear of the dentist's chair.

But by this reasoning, Sierra could be my past life. Or, technically, my future life. My destiny, pulling me toward her. Sierra as a vision, prophetic or just probabilistic. Sierra is a thread, a wispy tie, thin but strong, that ties me to Tony and Echo, to the years we will spend together.

Sierra is me. And she is beyond me.

She is a fascinating person. I'm thinking about how I could draw her. But every time I draw her, I end up drawing me.

Sometimes I feel guilty for stealing Sierra's body from her.

I like to think she would be happy with how I'm using it. Even though I wasn't at all happy with how she used hers.

And then there is Echo. Echo is different from Sierra and Victor.

And yet, she's not.

Sometimes I wonder if I should feel guilty for all I'm doing with Caroline's body. If I am guilty of the things that all those Dollhouse clients were.

Sometimes I wonder if I and Tony haven't kidnapped her in our own way, as surely as Rossum did. Our love, like shackles, keeping her here with us instead of where she's supposed to be. Stopping her from being her best.

Echo is my dark lady.

My soul loves her in its shadows. But the shadow's hold is surprisingly strong.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Echo is my Dark Lady of the sonnets. Because loving her is like a fire.

Echo's love brings pain.

She inspires us to be free and strong. She convinces us to live instead of giving up or wasting away.

And all those things are wonderful. But freedom and strength and choosing to live... they're also damn painful.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Echo is my Dark Lady, whom I can never have all to myself.

And I'm not talking about sharing her with Tony, or sharing Tony with her. Nothing has ever been easier than that. I think we loved her even in the Dollhouse, even before we realized all she had done for us. And you know what they say... "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds."

It was easy to keep loving her. And she and Victor are beautiful together. Dark hair and strong limbs and thick eyelashes. Sweat glistening, hair messy, lips laughing or whispering or moaning or kissing. When their dark eyes look up at me, it's a doubly intoxicating pleasure, a doubly enticing invitation. What kind of fool refuses such love?

But my Dark Lady is fickle.

She is many people, and she has many people, wantonly inside of her, jostling about inside of her, seducing her into tending to their baser desires.

The desire for that world which once nearly destroyed us.

The world of exploitation and vileness and false smiles and false lives. In other words, the real world.

And it's not so much the world that Echo misses. It's being within striking distance of it.

Echo misses being a fighter.

Tony doesn't. He is thankful every day that he's not one.

But Echo misses it, fiercely.

It's hard for her, having such an excess, such a surfeit of virtues, and to live such a tiny life. The three of us, hiding. Making love, making art, making comfortable lives. I worry that she is more enamored with making powerful enemies and impossible rescues, with making the world over.

It's hard for her to stay here with us, fickle as she is.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Echo sits for me, when she poses so I can draw, I recite sonnets to her from memory.

I tell her all the reasons I believe that she is my dark lady.

She knows that I am joking and that I'm not.


End file.
